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Several days a week, when I go to pick my daughter up from school, we don’t make it home. That is to say, we get waylaid—usually at school.
After years of unreliable childcare, my daughter is now at a preschool I would have ached to attend as a kid. There are acres of property dotted with climbing trees, vegetable gardens, rolling hills (as in, hills for rolling down), dirt for digging, swings, slides, and trails in every direction that lead to woods, rivers, and playgrounds. It is no wonder that she never wants to leave. Her teachers don’t mind if we stay to play, but usually most everyone else opts to go. Pickup is at 3:30pm (because that’s a full day of childcare around here—a rant for another day). People have places to go, errands to run. They pack into their cars and clear out. By 3:45, we are among a sparse handful of leftovers on campus.
On one of these afternoons, as I plop onto the grass under a shady tree to watch my kid splash in a mud puddle with a couple of friends, I run through the usual litany of thoughts: Damn, it feels good to sit down. Am I allowed to sit down? Why is no one else sitting down? Should I be grocery shopping? When are the library books due? Should I have hired a sitter so I could keep working? Am I a bad parent because I’m not offering some sort of enrichment curriculum? Or even playing in the mud with her?
Eventually, we progress from the mud puddle to the climbing structure, where my daughter shows me some new maneuvers she’s mastered, and then we retreat again to the shade and pause for water and a snack of dried apple rings. There is no urgency, no agenda. Only the present tense. When we get too hot, or tired, or hungry, we’ll bike home. For now, there is a hammock between two pines that is calling to us.
Doing nothing in the middle of the afternoon feels deeply wrong—but also so, so right.
I have written about pausing and slowing down often in the last several years; clearly it is a lifelong puzzle that I’m trying to solve. I gobble up books and interviews about rest and unproductivity. I’m working to unravel my own addiction to…working. I am reminded again and again that the act of slowing down is neither easy nor safe, because it poses a threat to the pillars of capitalism. While doing nothing does not come naturally to me, I crave it madly with every fiber of my being. When I resent someone for having time to relax, to play, to not work—it is because I want what they have. I want to stop. I want to sleep. I want to wander through the woods picking raspberries and daydreaming. I want to lie on a picnic blanket listening to live music. I want to float on a river. I want to be still, and for that to be okay.
With all this midlife puzzling, I am now better able to recognize when I come closer to nothingness and give thanks. But the obligations of midlife, together with my achievement-fed upbringing, mean that most of my moments of pause are still unintentional. You have encountered these—times when the hamster wheel grinds to a screeching halt due to circumstances out of your control: injury, illness, job loss, natural disaster, personal tragedy, global catastrophe. Suddenly you are actually incapable of working nonstop, maintaining a household, contemplating a to-do list. We rest, your body says, or we die. And so you do.
But that is a terrible list. We need more nothing, but we need less of that depressing crap that comes with it. Every summer for the last few years, I’ve made a summer bucket list. Summer in Vermont is short, and I don’t want it to race by without a single s’more or glass of sangria. But last year, historic flooding just a few weeks into summer ruined any chance of my bucket list getting completed. It hung, ghostlike, on my refrigerator as a daily reminder of all the things we couldn’t do.
This year, I didn’t make one. The wound is still too tender. Anything could happen that would render my plans moot. I can’t stomach that disappointment. I still want to savor my summer, though, so I’m conducting an experiment. This time, my plan is to make no plans. I want to put myself in the way of doing more nothing. And I have a revolutionary hypothesis: I suspect that in enjoying the moments of summer as they happen, rather than checking them off a list, I will savor them even more.
Sure, we still have the standard calendar of events: plane trips, weddings, swimming lessons, birthday parties. I bought tickets to the circus. But I’m trying to leave space. Go with the flow. Revel in what comes without the burden of expectations. While I don’t welcome the type of life events that lead to involuntary pauses, I can create the settings in which nothingness flourishes. Places like waiting rooms; rocking chairs; buses, trains and planes; water bodies; tents; no-reception zones; and other peoples’ houses. In short, mostly outside and away from home. Less than two weeks ago, I accidentally caught the most incredible northern lights I’ve ever seen, so I’m off to a good start.
On another post-preschool afternoon, two friends and fellow lingerers invite us to walk along the river in search of “Osprey Beach,” one of the secret sites the kids have visited with their class. Ominous clouds are closing in, though, so we decide to pivot. We drive to a nearby park and let our barefoot toddlers lead the way down the trail. Along the walk, they point out a “family” of stinging nettles, and I spot a striped jack-in-the-pulpit. We start to hear thunder and teach the kids about counting the seconds between the flash and the boom.
After deeming it prudent to turn around only a few minutes into the hike, we ask the kids if they are ready to head home. Not yet—and neither, truthfully, are we. The four of us take shelter under a picnic pavilion a few steps from our cars. As the flashes and booms drift closer together, the grownups exchange stories of harrowing thunderstorm experiences. The kids play “airplane” on the picnic benches, flying to exotic locales like Arkansas and North Dakota.
“Would you like a book or a toy for the ride?” my daughter asks as I take my seat behind the cockpit, straddling the bench. She is both pilot and flight attendant, and I am the passenger.
“A book, please,” I say.
“And where would you like to go? Maybe California?” she asks.
“Oooh I don’t know,” I hesitate. “I’m pretty content right here today.”
“Then home it is,” she declares. “Buckle your seatbelt and prepare for take-off!”
Sending you all light, life, and love,
Devon
This is a really good reminder to pause and just be. I tend to move on from one thing to the next thing, to the next thing, even just to prepare my mind for what’s coming up. But more nothing, please is an aspiration I’d like to work closer toward.